The CD The Souvenir, featuring the work of Russian folk group "Russian folk group" has everything you could imagine and less. Starting with the ravishing album cover, a black and white photocopied slip of paper of four frozen grins standing about in Tsarist costumes, the CD is just full of delights. They will take you back to the sounds and sights of old Russia - a trusty old woodcutter merrily playing away on his saw, for instance, or the anxiety-inducing 'melody on birch tree logs', played on birch trees specifically cut down for the occasion.

You can't get more Russian than this: one track begins with the sound of ducks quacking melodiously over the still waters of a Moscow lake; another, geese honking malodorously over the stagnant fens of a Siberian sewer. In a third, it is said, if you listen very closely, you can hear the sound of mould growing on the Balalaika player's thirteen month old cheese.

This CD can be found in no good music stores, and no bad music stores either, but you can get it at a very cheap price from the Baron and Tim's CD shelf. Come and get it now. PLEASE come and get it now.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

For every stylish, black skivvy-clad Bohemian artist, there is a white cat somewhere growing a single white hair that will drift through the air, and on to the stylish black skivvy of the Bohemian artist, marring their silent air of suave sophistication.

For every sleek, modern owner of the swish, modern house, walking about their environs at night after the shower in their cool white towel, there is a tap somewhere with a tiny smudge of black grease, which smudge will somehow find its way to the sleek, modern finger of the sleek, modern owner of the etc, and which will find its way from that finger to the cool white towel, and cause the world to seem just that little bit less sleek, and swish to the owner, who will reflect upon life with slightly more gloom in the future.

Watching beer ferment might seem to some to be as exciting as watching grass grow. But what's wrong with grass growing? To see the fierce, fecund follicles thrust their way through the moist loam, and charge into the daylight at a terrifying velocity of millimetres every day - to observe them as each day, gigantic feet crash down upon them, or sharpened metal objects sluice their way through the surrounding dirt, uprooting their brothers and sisters, or ferocious predators run around kicking the dirt up around them in search for worms and grubs - it's enough to give you a heart attack, I tell you!

Maybe you might say that watching beer ferment is about as exciting as watching compost, well... do whatever compost does. Though of course, as any respectable cat (named Harriet and/or Beatrice) will tell you, this is just about the most exciting thing you can do all day, though the mice that have taken up residence within may disagree.

Besides, watching beer ferment is every bit as exciting as both those things, although it is not as grassy as grass, and contains substantially fewer mice than our compost. And also, why use these similes, anyway? Watching beer ferment is almost as exciting as watching beer ferment, maybe even higher. We have a lovely clear glass bottle, of about five litres capacity (procured from the Greensborough supplier) sitting on the kitchen bench at the moment, completely transparent. The dark wort-and-yeast mixture has been nestled within, nicely filling the rounded edges of the bottle. Over the first few days it has been gradually developing the characteristic pale clouds at the top, calmly bubbling away; and every so often enough carbon dioxide gathers at the bottom of the bubbleator, and a little carbon dioxide bubble goes up into the air and - so global warming theory tells us - a Pacific Island Nation somewhere explodes (or something).

This process, I have been informed by two independent authorities, is known as 'blooping'. And who am I to gainsay them.

You may think this is a pointless post. But what am I talking to you for anyway? I'm going back to looking at the beer ferment now.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Where else but the net would you find a recipe for biscuits that involves 'one egg', which then advises you that the recipe makes a lot of biscuits, and if you don't want so much, you just need to split the recipe in half?

How do you split an egg in half again? With a knife?

And then there was the time I looked for a whey bread recipe and all the recipes I found involved '3/4 whey'. What? Three quarters whey along with one quarter of something else? Three quarters of the whey produced with using another recipe, and if so, hang on...

I think I will make it my mission, before I die, to submit a recipe to Taste.com.au involving measurements like

One metre of flour
Two-tenths of a light year of butter
Four seconds of dark chocolate
And
a teaspoonful of tablespoons.

When I feel like being humbled, there's nothing better than playing a little Abecedarian game with the Baron. We simply nominate a category and go through each of the letters of the alphabet finding a word for that category. "Albatross", the Baron will say, beginning an Abecededarian game about birds. "Bah... bah... buh... b.... b... birds?" I will cry helplessly. "Crested warbler," the Baron will put in. "D... duh... der.... dah..." will be my first fumbling attempts at a bird-name, at which point the Baron will helpfully suggest the name of another bird beginning with D. I don't know what it is, obviously, I'm not the Baron.

Fun with another person, the Abecedarian game is dire on its own; I've tried it once or twice and I inevitably end up either forgetting what letter I'm up to, not remembering any word to go with that letter, or getting distracted thinking about gingerbread, sometimes all three at once. It's humbling to realise you can't outwit another person but humiliating to realise you can't even outwit yourself.

However, I flatter myself that I am all right at the Abecedarian game when it comes to composers. Despite - or perhaps because - I studied music at university, I can't do much more than that. I know that there was a composer called something something Gottschalk, but I couldn't actually name a piece that he's written. And (a recent discovery) I have sorely underestimated the number of 'B' composers in the world. But anyway, there's -

Albeniz
Bach
Couperin
Delibes
Elgar
Faure
Gibbons
Haydyn
Ives
Janacek

and so on the list goes, right down to the little hiccough around Q, and the quibble around Vaughan-Williams (V or W)? But then we get to the X -

Xenaxis.

Now Xenaxis is a composer that I have a wholly impartial opinion about. I haven't heard a single note that he has ever written, and you can't get more impartial than that. Moreover, even though I have never heard a note that Xenaxis has written, they confuse the hell out of me anyway. Confusion, I have found, is an essential state for the appreciation of modern life, and especially for the understanding of the modern arts, and most especially for the understanding of modern music. (The most important thing for enjoyment of Boulez, I think, might be learning to not enjoy everything anyone else has written ever.)

I realise that my not knowing much about a modern composer who would only end up addling my wits if I did hear him makes me only one of many, but on the other hand, only a critic with such a clear and unbiased opinion of the subject he is writing about will be able to edify his audience. "I never read a book before reviewing it;" proclaims Sydney Smith, "it prejudices a man so."

Born 19___, Iannis Xenaxis quickly became one of the most influential composers of ___, working in a style that can best be described as (abstract impressionism/obtuse expressionism/abject depressionism). By combining ancient Greco-Persian modal rhythms with late-19th century polymetrical developments in instrumentation, Xenaxis was able to break new ground in the theory of practice, or the practice of theory, or two of the above three options. His atonal serials were highly prized amongst musicians, as were his breakfast serials, but it was perhaps in the art of advanced architectonic yoghurt making that he first came to world prominence. Whatever he wrote, and whenever he wrote it, and whyever he did whatever it was that he was supposed, alleged, and possibly even did do, he is rightly celebrated to this day in the home town of his birth, wherever that is.

Next time, I will provide an equally clear, unbiased, and ignorant historo-economical view of regicide as practised by NASA astronauts during the moon landings, 1960- the present.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I'm a fan of cooking, and have been ever since, as a kid, I figured out that the best way of getting to lick out the cake tin was to make the cake yourself. There've been a few bumps on the way - the time, for instance, I decided to make fried rice by, er, pouring dry rice onto a frying pan and, er, frying it. But mostly it's been a pretty sweet relationship, as you'd expect for something involving so much sugar and butter and milk and treacle and sultanas.

So, you'd think that, after all this time, I'd know how to cook something so simple and basic as a good apple crumble, right? Wrong; even now I still manage to get this quite obvious recipe wrong. Apples, sugar, flour, and butter make a surprisingly large amount of combinations together:

Apple fumble
This was a very obvious error on my part. After stewing the apples sufficiently, I somehow thought that the way you made apple crumble was mixing together the sugar and butter and flour, and then stirring it through the whole apple mixture and putting it in the oven. I learned my mistakes from that one pretty quickly.

Apple bumble
Bearing in mind the lesson from the previous week's Apple fumble experiment, I nevertheless somehow contrived to stuff up the entire recipe by adding altogether too much butter so that what resulted on top was not a crumble, but a thin gruel that seeped through the entire mixture anyway, just like the fumble.

Apple humble
On one or two occasions I have managed to turn out a fairly decent Apple humble. And no-wonder I'm humble about it, too, because it's not me doing it at all, I'm just following a recipe out of the Stephanie Alexander cookbook sitting on our shelf.

Apple grumble
You would think that I would have been content to follow that recipe ever after but, oh, no. I just went back to my old ideas about throwing this and that and what have you together and producing something even worse than you'd expect. At this point when I see what happens, I add the grumbles, the crucial ingredient for the dessert, and everyone applauds.

I could go on; and I probably will go on, in future, producing endless variations on this theme. What next? Apple stumble (smashed crockery)? Apple rumble (a dessert that makes you run for the toilet?) It is a dreadful vision of things to come, all right.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

He went out of the yard, and found a draught horse of Skallagrim's, got
on its back and rode after Skallagrim's party. No easy way had he over
the moor, for he did not know the road; but he kept his eyes on the
riders before him when copse or wood were not in the way. And this is to
tell of his journey, that late in the evening he came to Swan-ness,
when men sat there a-drinking.Egil's Saga

It is just appalling, the effect our current lax drinking rules and regulations have on the drinking habits of 10th century Vikings. Clearly, we need to change our laws relating to drink pricing and labelling now, before it is too late for these 10th century Vikings who are, er, late.

He went into the room, but when Yngvar saw Egil he received him
joyfully, and asked why he had come so late. Egil told of his words with
Skallagrim. Yngvar made Egil sit by him, they two sat opposite
Skallagrim and Thorolf. For merriment over their ale they fell to
reciting staves. Then Egil recited a stave:

'Hasting I came to the hearth fire
Of Yngvar, right fain so to find him,
Him who on heroes bestoweth
Gold that the heather-worm guardeth.
Thou, of the snake's shining treasure
Always a generous giver,
Wilt not than me of three winters
Doughtier song-smith discover.'

Yngvar praised this stave, and thanked Egil much therefor, but on the
morrow he brought to Egil as reward for the poem three sea-snail shells
and a duck's egg.

This regrettable incident clearly shows the deleterious effects of alcohol advertising in sport, or something. If only Egil Skallagrimson had not been exposed at a young age to alcohol advertising that occurred long after he was dead, this happening would not have happened (apart from happening). We must stop Vikings receiving sea-snail shells and duck eggs at all costs!

Egil's poetry won him thanks from many men.

Yet more evidence of the shocking toll of drinking on Iceland's Australia's young.

It's a fascinating historical discussion - but you don't really need hundreds of words to answer that question when only one or two will do: I did. And I did it just on the weekend.

It's amazing what a little yeast will do, when you use it in the right way. On the weekend I happened to find, lying around the house, some malted barley, a bag of hops, several staples, a book of the life of Charles Babbage, an empty jar, and a malodorous sock that hadn't been cleaned for a week. On a spur of the moment decision, I harvested some yeast from the sock, and it turned out to be just the sort that I needed.

Within moments, I had mixed the basic ingredients together with some water on the stove. For flavouring I added the hops, and strained several key facts from the book about Charles Babbage into a sack of cheesecloth I had sitting in a colander, before adding this to the beverage. When it was the right temperature, I added the yeast. By Sunday afternoon they were fermenting in in the jar on the bench.

I checked on them in the evening and already the mixture had started making rudimentary email connections. Several hours later, it had discovered the secret of blogging. By the morning, it was tweeting vigorously amongst itself, and getting into huge arguments with itself on facebook.

Now that I've invented the internet, though, I'm not sure what to do with it. You can't really drink it, can you? I think I'll just go back to making beer, next time.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Considering the situation in Brazil, the crisis in Venezuala, the troubles in Cuba, and the frets and niggles elsewhere, whatever those situations, crises, troubles, frets, and niggles might be, I am going to take decisive action today. Instead of picking my nose, I am going to picket my nose.

Played some Messiaen to the cats last night, and they didn't like it. Not a bit of it. I believe they may have performed the feline equivalent of 'throwing ones hands into the air and ran screaming in the other direction', in fact. Which is odd, considering that Messiaen always uses a lot of birdsong in his music.

Normally, when the cats hear birdsong, they get all excited and want to eat something, ideally the bird. You would have thought that on hearing this, they would have wanted to eat Messiaen. Apparently not.

Try this experiment at home with your own cats. Play a bit of Messiaen to them. Do they try to eat the computer? Do they try to eat you? Or do they throw their hands up and running screaming in the opposite direction? What about you?

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Pondering recently on the strategical, tactical, physical, metaphysical, theological, ideological, and methodological, well, methodology of male micturation from a vertically upright position, I concluded that there are a number of complex complexities involved in such an operation that make it fraught with dangers, imperilled with difficulties, and an altogether bothersome trouble indeed.

It would not do to enter into an abstruse discussion of all these troublish difficulties here, save for the fact that the curvilinear nature of the cistern bowl, combined with the fact that the function of micturation from the vertically upright male homo sapien occurs from a height of some distance, and the increasing unreliability of the homo sapien's ocular organs with every chronologically increasing year, makes the possibility of the homo sapien in question committing an inaccuracy in the act of micturation, or possibly making a grave error in the direction of the parabolic arc of fluid emerging from him, thus causing dramatic but problematic rebounds, or just maybe missing altogether, seem increasingly possible, or (possibly) possibly increasing, which is something no entity in particularity desires.

(Notwithstanding these undoubtable factoids, neither can one cannot fully rule out the possibility that said male homo sapien, in a puckish spirit of mischief or, maybe, outright malice, has committed the error on purpose. But let us avoid this possibility by not entering into it in the first place.)

In contrast, then, happy are those male homo sapiens who, instead of chancing these dangers in the necessary act of expulsion of bodily fluids while remaining upright, instead opt, decide, and settle upon the seat offered them, and thus arrange what parts there are to arrange in order to perform their function in as efficient and cleanly a manner as possible! Happy are those, too, who enter the facility after their departure, and find it just as clean, nay, cleaner, than the vestibule which they have exited!

Nevertheless, it does seem that it is the manly prerogative of all male homo sapiens to exercise their ability to micturate while in an upright vertical position, and this prerogative one would not wish to take off them; nay, it is a prerogative that one often enters into oneself, when one has the opportunity.

And that, in conclusion, and to sum up, is the final, if not last, word that one will have to utter on the subject.

COMING UP: One will enter into a discussion of that other vital dilemma that confronts homo sapiens of all genders, and varieties, etcs, in the cistern: when faced with a few square sheets of papers and the necessity of manipulating said sheets of papers for the sake of one's health and pristine nature, does one exert excessive pressure on those papers beneath one's digits, or does one instead opt for the more bothermost trouble, and attempt to perform rectangular origami on them before applying them to one's nether regions? It is a most important topic, and we will undertake to examine it in some depth, in all possible likelihood.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The Baron had just left these parts for a couple of days, and as soon as she departed two buttons burst off my coat. Coincidence, or causative relationship? I'll leave you to figure that one out, but in the meantime, the two buttons are sitting on the table mocking me.

What to do? Fix them up, and as soon as the Baron finds out she might expect me to do that sort of thing everyday. It's buttons one day, and Bayeux tapestries the next, I tell you.

On the other hand, bugger it. I'll just bloody sew them back on.

UPDATE! - I'll get around to it. Soon. I just have to finish this medieval tapestry I'm working on...

I was doing a bibliography the other night. You may very well ask why.

In fact, between my wondering whether to semi- a colon, or colon a comma, my lifting up of a publisher title and bodily carrying it from one room to another, weighing up a series of ampersands so as to determine their average weight in metric kilograms, getting distracted and using an em dash as a cricket bat with the dot on the top of a lower case ‘i' as a ball, in the process breaking a spice jar, opening a parenthesis and letting in a rather cold breeze, putting all the numbers in alphabetical order, the letters in numerical order, and the apostrophes in both, and wondering whether to file The King James Bible under A for Anonymous, G for God, J for James, or M for Miscellaneous, I asked myself the very same question. What am I doing? What are bibliographies for, anyway? Is this really what my life has come down to, shifting a series of letters and numbers around the page while the chickens creep inside the house and try to nick the cat food?

But then I spotted a full stop and wondered whether it should be italicised or not, the question of which satisfyingly occupied my mind, and I continued merrily on my way putting the ‘og’ into bibliography.

Friday, July 13, 2012

UPDATE! - Some of the other joys in that linked interview: the comment that studies reveal a persons behaviour changes after a few drinks. (It's called 'being drunk', I think). Same guy then goes on to say that some wines are cheaper than bottled water and this is a terrible thing (though tap water is cheaper than both bottled water and bottled wine, so what's the problem?) When asked if they want exactly the same approach to alcohol as to cigarettes he says something like, 'not at the moment, no'.

But you can avoid this tragedy in your own home by breaking your own coffee pot, on purpose. Do it now. Also, smash any mirrors in the house, walk repeatedly widdershins around any black cats you might find, and spill the salt (I did that several weeks ago. Well, it was the cheese salt, but that counts, right?)

Only by trying as hard as possible to be as destructive as possible will you avoid being as unlucky as possible on the unluckiest day of the year.

Either that, or some other unpredictable devastating accident will happen to you, such as your car exploding, and you will be left with a ruined house as well as a smashed-up car. But you'll never know if you don't try, will you?

"Because we are us," said Julia Gillard, making everyone wonder who the us is that the we was.

Was the 'we' who is 'us' the 'they' who was 'them', or would that be confusing the 'they' who was 'them' with the 'them' that was 'those'? And just what did those thems have to do with yours that was theirs, or should I say the was that is us?

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

I was just busy composing a monotonic ring tone for my pizza oven when someone asked me, 'Tim, you speak to London Mayor Boris Johnson all the time. How does he get his hair so wonderfully tousled in just the right way, so that it is neither too tousled, nor too untousled, but that it has just the right amount of tousle-age in order to gain him success in the polls.'

And I am glad they asked this question. For there is nothing so important to modern politics than the amount of tousle-age to Boris Johnson's hair, as it conveys all the right implications of in-controlness but devil-may-careness at all the right moments to all the right people. Not a hair is tousled out of place; indeed, if there were some portions of inappropriate tousling, it is likely that some devastating geopolitical disaster would happen.

By applying equations derived from measuring Margaret Thatcher's beehive hairdo during the key points of her career, factoring in statistics gained from a crack squad of tousle-age specialists assigned to count the vanishing strands of hair on the noggin of John Howard, and finishing it all off with a number of algorithms derived from modern chaos theory, modern scientists, working deep in underground laboratories in Henley-on-Thames have arrived at the optimum tousle-age theorem for Boris Johnson's hair. It is neither tousled too far to the right, nor to the left, neither too far up or too far down, and we certainly do not apply the 'tropical storm' tousle, with the hairs going in every direction.

Certain detractors, slanderers, and progressive rapscallions have made the vile calumniation that nobody tousles Boris Johnson's hair at all, but their fallacious opinions are of course known to be wrong by every right-minded citizen; and when the identities of these slanderers is made known, they will be marched off to a secret facility and forced to listen to a tape of David Cameron reading them bedtime stories until they repent.

Sunday, July 08, 2012

So when you make cheese (now here's an enticing and original subject), and you make whey from the cheese, and you make cheese from the whey that you get from the cheese, and you make whey from the cheese that you get from the whey that you get from the cheese in the first place, what do you do with that whey that you've got left over from the whey?

Do you throw it away, the whey? Or is there a way of using the whey so you don't have to throw it away, hey?

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

MERNDA, WEDNESDAY - Astounding developments in the particle physics world today, when scientists tracked the Higgs Boson particle down to a bar in Mernda and discovered that the obscure sub-atomic entity thinks you are a 'bastard'.

In more controversial news, the Higgs Boson particle maintains that you 'knicked a hundred dollars off me and won't give it back' and maintains that 'yez is looking the wrong way at me girlfriend.'

Particle physicists, who used careful scientific equations and high-tech experimental devices to track down the whereabouts of the Higgs Boson particle have yet to formulate the latest results in a paper. However, they say they will be certain to include all of the Higgs Boson particle's claims about you as part of their researches.

The Higgs Boson particle, which can be found in the Mernda pub every day of the week except some Mondays when it goes to the local Centrelink to get money, claims troubles started with you years ago when 'you smashed the window on my car.' It notes that it said 'I'll smash you, I'll smash your face, I will', but you did not back down. The Higgs Boson particle says it is 'effin' scared of you' and is calling the cops on you as soon as it gets out of the pub.

However, other sub-atomic particles found in the same pub did not back the Higgs Boson particle's dramatic claims about you. The Charmed Quark said 'yer a top bloke' while the Neutrino reckons it 'scored some top mushies off you mate, real beaut ones.'

A full list of claims the Higgs Boson particle has made about you will be released by Friday, as well as a scientific paper about its whereabouts.

The Higgs Boson particle is incredibly small, zings back and forth amongst other incredibly small particles doing inconceivable things in bizarre ways, and apparently scientists have just found it. I have no idea what it all means, you probably don't either, I think the guys doing all those experiments are rather befuddled as well, and, all in all, whatever we have discovered, it is rather confusing. However, we can take comfort from Hillaire Belloc's wise words:

Oh! Let no-one ever ever doubtWhat nobody is sure about.

Apparently, all it took was a gigantic machine costing zillions of dollars that stretched around half a continent, whizzing incredibly small particles at terrifyingly fast speeds and smashing them all into one another, just maybe possibly risking destroying the entire galaxy in the process, and then looking very, very carefully at the results. Less generous souls might suggest that the scientists made it up years ago just so they could get such an incredibly cool device built, but let's not go there. Scientists! They've done it again!

Now, anyway, onto the other mysteries of the universe. Did you know that when I typed 'Happy bunny fairy land' into Google I didn't get any results? You'd think someone would have realised the vital need for a site with 'Happy bunny fairy land' written on it somewhere by now. But nooooooooooooo! Thank heavens this site is here to fulfill all your needs.

In Genesis, God didn't begin proceedings by saying 'Let there be light.' Instead, he said 'Let there be hligt.' It was all a mistake owing to a confusion over spelling.

According to proponents of this little known theological theorem, God's first creation, hligt, remains with us even today, bringing sweetness and hligt to our everyday lives. Unfortunately, it is not clear what hligt is or what business God had in creating it, but they are certain that it plays a very important, though confusingly unknown, role in creation at large.

However, this sub-school itself has a sub-sub-school of theological studies, who contend that the English language translators of the Bible themselves merely translated a mispelling from the original Hebrew. They argue that in order to get to the bottom of this mystery, we merely have to work out what the Hebrew word for hligt was, and, notwithstanding the fact that they neither know what hligt is, or how to spell or mispell it in Hebrew, or, really, anything about the mysterious mystical mystery that is hligt, they are quite certain they will get to the bottom of matters one day.

And anyway, they propound, God moves in mysterious ways, and none more mysterious than when he first created and blessed us all with the loving mysterious bounties of hligt. And what a soundly profound propounding that is.